psychedelia
Kieron Tyler
The Kinks: Muswell HillbilliesRock’s rich tapestry currently has it that 1968’s The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is their best album. This deluxe edition, 2CD reissue of 1971’s Muswell Hillbillies isn’t going to alter that, but it does force the emphasis away from the notion that their most lasting legacy will be a fascination with and celebration of Britishness.The album found Ray Davies and co looking to American archetypes, musical and cultural, and bringing them into songs drawing figurative links between the former colony and those still wedded to the old country. Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The hip hop music of California has always been deeply stoned, and the wave of instrumental beats that have emerged from LA in recent years have taken this to quite some extreme. The scene around the Brainfeeder collective and Low End Theory club have, in fact, produced some of the most deeply psychedelic music of the 21st century, and Sam Baker aka Samiyam is one of the key figures within that.Baker's profile is relatively low outside the scene but he is a foundational figure within it, and his influence is subtly felt more widely: key UK label Hyperdub released an EP in 2008, and electronic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dino Valente: Dino ValenteDino Valenti’s reaction to his sole solo album being credited to Dino Valente isn’t recorded, but any confusion probably wouldn’t have mattered as he had such high-profile cheerleaders. Before its release in October 1968, Ralph J Gleason, then America’s most important commentator on rock and pop, called Valenti – who died in 1994 – “an underground Bob Dylan”. After its release, Lillian Roxon, New York’s most trenchant observer of musical trends, said he was “a macrobiotics-solar-energy legend”. In Rolling Stone in January 1969, Ben Fong-Torres repeated the " Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If it seems mythical that a singer-songwriter in his early seventies has made an album this vital yet so timeless, then it’s worth pondering that Man & Myth is Roy Harper’s first for 13 years. In 2011, he celebrated his 70th birthday on stage but in the decade before his profile had been low, with time in his Irish home seemingly filled by anything that wasn’t creating new music. It might be making up for lost time, but Man & Myth’s 23-minute closing epic “Heaven Is Here”/“The Exile” is a career highlight. With 20 albums behind him (depending how it’s counted), the first of which came Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
MGMT’s last album, 2010’s Congratulations, defined a modern psychedelia of the highest order. Bold of sweep, full of ambition and tinged with the airs of defeat and desperation, it set Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wyngarden up as ones to watch: a duo whose early electropop-inclined work had been left far behind. It’s unfortunate then that their self-titled third album does not take them even further out. Instead, MGMT is the sound of a band stuck in low gear.To a degree, Goldwasser and Van Wyngarden have had some of their thunder stolen by the rise of Tame Impala and their leader Kevin Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Roky Erickson & the Aliens: The Evil One Roky Erickson: Don’t Slander Me, Gremlins Have PicturesRoky Erickson is usually depicted as America’s Syd Barrett: the leader of a pioneering psychedelic-era band who took too many drugs, had mental health issues and then dropped off the face of the earth. But unlike Barrett, or even his American contemporary Skip Spence, Erickson returned from the abyss.In 1980 he pulled off the remarkable coup of releasing an album on the British major label CBS. That first solo album – untitled in the UK (but usually referred to as Five Symbols due to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marianne Faithfull hasn’t got much time for her 1968 starring vehicle The Girl on a Motorcycle. In her autobiography Faithfull, she described it as “terrible…soft porn” and said of her co-star Alain Delon that he was a “pompous git". The trailer promised that while seeing it “you know the thrill of wrapping your legs around a tornado of pumping pistons”.The Girl on a Motorcycle was ludicrous, but not as bad as all this suggests. A game attempt at a trangressive coupling of sexual abandonment with the power of the motorbike, it was awarded an “X” certificate for it’s UK release. Faithfull Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Characterising a country’s music by its most successful exports or what seem to be typical local styles is inevitable. With Iceland, the home of Björk and Sigur Rós, it’s easy to assume that ethereality, otherworldliness and plain oddness rule the roost. Of course, that’s not the case. The artists awarded the Kraumur prize for the best albums released in 2012 testify to Iceland’s broad musical palette. On the next page, our look at the Kraumur winners ranges from the hotly-tipped Ásgeir Trausti to, among other surprises, home-grown reggae.Scandinavia as a whole doesn’t always escape similar Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Michael Hurley: Armchair Boogie / Hi Fi Snock UptownWith songs about werewolves, penguins, the English upper classes, trains, the police and more werewolves, these albums from surrealist folk maverick Michael Hurley are charming and occasionally disconcerting. His ramshackle delivery seems a little offhand but it brings an intimacy that can’t fail to worm its way in. Armchair Boogie (credited to Michael Hurley & Pals) was originally issued in 1971; Hi Fi Snock Uptown in 1972. Both originally came out Raccoon, the label run The Youngbloods.Armchair Boogie was the belated follow-up to Read more ...
Joe Muggs
When Tunng started out in 2005, they were a peculiar proposition. Treading a fine line between Heath Robinson ramshackle and meticulous high-tech, ancient and hyper-modern, bone percussion and glitchy electronic sparkles, they certainly deserved the then-popular term “folktronica”. Though their melodies were unerringly catchy, their lyrics were so out-there, their lineup so unorthodox and their sound so psychedelic it was never likely they'd be more than a cult act.So why, last night, did they bring nothing to mind so much as Fleetwood Mac or Paul McCartney's Wings? Their new, fifth, album Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dr. Feelgood: Taking No Prisoners (with Gypie 1977-1981)The departure of Wilko Johnson in April 1977 ought to have finished Dr. Feelgood. More than their guitarist and songwriter, he was vital to their stage persona and as much frontman as singer Lee Brilleaux. Yet after roping in temporary fill-ins for already scheduled live dates, by the end of April they had new guitarist John Cawthra on board. Quickly rechristened Gypie Mayo, he was on the road in May and soon forced to become a songwriter. This handsome box set is the full story on the Mayo-era Feelgoods.Spread across four CDs is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Continuing its voyage through Scandinavia’s music, theartsdesk opens the latest chapter in Norway with Still Life With Eggplant, the 16th album from Trondheim’s prolific, long-lived, occasionally challenging and always vital Motorpsycho.Their last album, 2012’s The Death Defying Unicorn, was an orchestrated collaboration with jazz composer and musician Ståle Storløkken which was performed at Oslo’s opera house. The one before that, 2010’s Heavy Metal Fruit, included the 20-minute “Gullible's Travails” and was almost as musically elaborate as …Unicorn. Their new album, the magnificent Still Read more ...